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Messages - [] Nao 尚
The Fatal Problem / Re: Issue(s)
« on June 4th, 09:43 PM »
Yeah, as I mentioned in the other topic, it looks like Barter is currently preventing other websites (or just Lestrade's?) from getting data from it.
Someone would have to ask the BVG webmaster to look into it and re-enable outside scraping.
We had this discussion years ago, and settled on a scraping system that was soft on his servers, I can look into making the updates less frequent (it's better than nothing), but if there's no way to get data from BVG, I will no longer be able to connect users between the websites, and make it possible to transfer tradables with tags, etc. Which would be... bad, for both websites (in my opinion).
Okay, so it looks like Barter broke their site or something... They no longer allow me to get their data.
Can someone contact the webmaster about this?
I'm getting 'Error 0' in return to my requests. I don't know if Lestrade's was banned (for no reason, since he's allowed me to scrape him, just like I tacitly allowed him to steal ideas from Lestrade's as a source for UI/UX improvements), or if it's the same for all websites.
Gosh, haven't touched this part of the code in a while... Can you post a screenshot, or something?
The Fatal Problem / Re: Issue(s)
« on April 24th, 11:22 AM »
Meh, LetsEncrypt does the job just fine and you don't have to go through another server for that.
The only problem is that I can never get to wake devotee up in time for fixing SSL...
Other than that, I could possibly move the server to another place, but I don't want to pay for it, etc.
It's not a project that earns me anything (either glory or fortune), and I added the server to my 'exception list' long ago (so that I wouldn't get SSL error notifications), so I don't know what else to say... Add to your exceptions? Or try & find a way to get in touch with devotee because I can't ;)
The Fatal Problem / Re: Issue(s)
« on April 19th, 04:51 PM »
Yeah and Devotee is nowhere to be found, again ;)

I always convince myself he's finally automated the renewal, lol... It's just a matter of adding a script.
I removed redir's two alternate accounts, one a week ago, and another ('Alternater', even the name says it..) right now.
As always it's the usual: poor quality offers, and insults to anyone who declines.
At this point I no longer need to warn him... I'll just force-cancel all of his offers. Waste of time for him more than me...
The Noble Talk / Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
« on April 11th, 12:52 AM »
Quote from []Nao 尚 on April 10th, 04:31 PM
Lestrade's is set to auto-delete any accounts with no contents after 6 months or something without logging in.
My bad-- I double-checked, and I'm only deleting tradables/wishlist/library that were added automatically, so that nothing gets lost in the process. It doesn't delete members at all. It's just that I tested on a wrong member ID.
The Illustrious Idea / Re: some suggestions :) ❗❗❗
« on April 10th, 04:56 PM »
1. Well, it would be inadequate to sort by full price when some games are very often on sale at 50% off, even more. (Indie games, notably.)
There isn't really a metric to estimate a game's value, so I tend to use prices (even though I'd never buy over there), if only to compare the prices of two games with different ratios, to determine if some common game has more market value than a rarer game, and if it's worth trading for it. At that point, suffice to say the retail price point doesn't really make sense to me. If you can give me some examples, I could look into it, but... :-/
I could, however, possibly allow sorting by 'lowest price recorded'. That'd make more sense, to me. Even though it always has limitations -- if a game went 80% off on a special weekend years ago and hasn't moved since, it really shouldn't be considered as a viable metric.

2. Hmm, that'd be a nightmare for long lists... Plus, one of Lestrade's things is that the entire system gets you as much information as possible in as limited a space as possible. It's a hard balance to maintain. Adding banners here would force me to put both lists on top of each other, as opposed to in front of each other, making balanced choices less natural to me. I could possibly add a banner when hovering over the title, _but_ it'd only work on desktop computers, not on smartphones.
The Noble Talk / Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
« on April 10th, 04:31 PM »
Fix: because there are very few users who get banned from Lestrade's (basically there's only just ONE user who keeps insulting people and trying to scam then, and then comes back under a new name), I forgot to implement a few things related to banning.
So, from now on, when a user is banned:
- this information shows up on their profile for everyone to know (previously, it was only viewable by me)
- their tradables, wishlist, library and blacklist are all emplied, and all ratios updated. (Previously, well, nothing.)
- you won't be able to send them an offer anyway. (I don't know if it's important, since their lists are emptied...)

I'm on the fence regarding deleting active offers, though. It might be considered as censorship. (?)
Posted: April 10th, 04:26 PM

Note: I've noticed a minor issue, but...
Lestrade's is set to auto-delete any accounts with no contents after 6 months or something without logging in. I never even considered ban status. Meaning people who got banned before might technically be able to come back after 6 months. I'll have to look into it seriously, but since this only applies to just a handful of people, it's easy to check.
Someone messaged me this week regarding a new account made by ReDiR here... Could you please tell me here?
Because I tried to remember that account name, but I forgot it, and since Steam always sucks when it comes to chatting, there's no way I can remember who contacted me about it either... And I'm not looking through hundreds of friends ;)
The Fatal Problem / Re: Issue(s)
« on March 22nd, 05:04 PM »
Fixed. The issue comes from the fact that ITAD bundle imports are forced to work with game names, and sometimes bundle reporters will enter a name that's not on Steam, but it'll find an equivalent in another store, so this'll be used. Meh.

I could add some kind of failsafe to prevent non-Steam games being added without my manual approval, but I like mostly having the thing working without human intervention.
The Illustrious Idea / Re: Give me more stats
« on March 22nd, 05:02 PM »
There are more stats but they're only available to me, ahah :^^;:
I don't know, I've never seen any interest in stats beyond my own interest!
It's not about the resource drain, it's 100% about the on-screen clutter. I'm already quite unhappy with how busy some pages look (such as the library pages), and thinking of ways to make them easier to go through. (I thought going for divs instead of tables would help, but it actually made it worse. Not in a hurry to touch this again...)
The Fatal Problem / Re: Issue(s)
« on March 14th, 11:38 PM »
Apologies about the downtime today... I wrote a faulty SQL statement that was missing a safeguard, and ended up running it a million times (!) more than needed. Oops! Had to wait until the query finished, reset the database, and then run the fix query which just took a second or so... Silly me.
Note: banned user 'Kalves', who was reported to be scamming users out of their games. I noticed public insults from them as well, and I only got insulted in return when I asked for clarification. As a result, I also deleted all of their pending trade offers.
It has also been reported that this would be the same person as ReDiR, who was banned long ago at Lestrade's, and has got quite a reputation at bvg as well.

Anyway, I simply recommend not trading with ReDiR and Kalves if they send you offers on other sites.

PS: first ban in over a year and a half.